Introduction

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Created by Kimberly Hirsh, Jane McMahon, Katelyn Browne, Liz Koehler, and Denise Munro

Purpose of this Wiki
This wiki was created as an appendix to the book Reading for Understanding: A Guide to Improving Reading in Middle and High School Classrooms. It serves as a guide to school librarians, explaining how they can apply the methods and strategies in Reading for Understanding to their own role as an advocate for literacy in their school library media programs.

Introduction to the Text


The authors of Reading for Understanding: A Guide to Improving Reading in Middle and High School Classrooms have developed an approach which allows teachers of all experience levels across different subject areas "to incorporate reading instruction within their subject area classes without adding new curriculum" (11, emphasis added). This approach was developed in two different contexts, one a required course in Academic Literacy for entering 9th graders at an urban high school, the other a network of various subject area teachers at a variety of middle and high schools. The authors call this approach "reading apprenticeship, a method in which the classroom teacher serves as master reader to his or her student apprentices" (12). In this approach, teachers make explicit to students their own normally invisible reading processes, empowering the students as their own knowledge grows. The strategies outlined in the book and this wiki can be used independently of the Reading Apprenticeship framework.

The authors identify four dimensions of classroom life which must support reading apprenticeships.

Dimensions of Classroom Life Supporting Reading Apprenticeships
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Original framework (c) John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Adapted by Kimberly Hirsh.


The Social Dimension

  • Creating safety
  • Investigating the relationship between literacy and power
  • Sharing book talk
  • Sharing reading processes, problems, and solutions
  • Noticing and appropriating others' ways of reading

The Personal Dimension

  • Developing reader identity
  • Developing metacognition
  • Developing reader fluency and stamina
  • Developing reader confidence and range

The Cognitive Dimension

  • Getting the big picture
  • Breaking it down
  • Monitoring comprehension
  • Using problem-solving strategies to assist and restore comprehension
  • Setting reading purposes and adjusting reading processes

The Knowledge-Building Dimension

  • Mobilizing and building knowledge structures (schemata)
  • Developing content or topic knowledge
  • Developing knowledge and use of text structures
  • Developing discipline- and discourse-specific knowledge

Metacognitive Conversation at the Center

"At the center of these interacting dimensions, and tying them together, is an ongoing conversation in which teacher and students think about and discuss their personal relationships to reading, the social environment and resources of the classroom, their cognitive activity, and the kinds of knowledge required to make sense of text" (22).